


light my candles in a daze

by aurilly



Category: Paris je t'aime (2006)
Genre: M/M, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-18
Updated: 2015-12-18
Packaged: 2018-05-07 12:30:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5456585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aurilly/pseuds/aurilly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Elie tries various ways to deal with the odd feeling the meeting with Gaspard elicited.</p>
            </blockquote>





	light my candles in a daze

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spock](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spock/gifts).



> Without the link to this clip in your letter, I would never have heard of this film. Thanks for the introduction!

Elie passed through the Place des Vosges for the second time that day, although at a slower pace than before. He kept his head down, and didn’t look at the buildings forming the iconic square. Too pink—it was always too pink and too pretty. Elie wanted to douse it all in blood red paint, make it lurid, like a Warhol. 

_Rouge sang._ The words repeated in his head like something from a movie. Two of the only words he’d understood from that entire unsettling encounter. He’d been replaying them in his head all day. Sang them. Sang, blood. 

Which wasn’t even a cognate, he reminded himself, just as a speeding car almost hit him, serving him right for being so out of it. He shook the phrase out of his head, crossed the street, and got in line.

Every Tuesday evening since arriving in Paris, Elie had stopped at the Bagel Store on rue de Turenne for the latest shipment from H&H. He lined up with all the in-the-know ex-patriated New Yorkers, out the door and onto the street, for freezer-packed tastes of home. He recognized the regulars, of which he had become one. There was the harried-looking mom who spoke English to her bratty French-responding son. There was the Long Island accent wrapped expensive suits who spent the whole time on his cell phone, yelling life updates to his Ma back in Massapequa. There was the pretty brunette around Elie’s age who always spent the wait with a dreamy half-smile on her face that Elie wished he could mirror—the half-smile of someone who was just so glad to be here.

Elie stood in line like he always did, but after a few minutes of fidgeting, he left without any bagels. For the first time, this wasn’t cutting it—this fake, half belonging no longer did it for him, no longer helped his loneliness. That itch had been rubbed, though not scratched, earlier today, and had left him in need of something this little ritual no longer had the power to temporarily satisfy. Week after week, Elie had lined up with them, but he’d never been one of them, not really. He’d never been to this bagel store on Broadway about which the people around him spoke with such reverent nostalgia. He was from fucking Maine.

Phrases continued to sing through his head, in a perfectly remembered accent. Charlie Parker. Rouge sang. Le dix-septième.

He hadn’t understood much, but he’d understood that. Something about the seventeenth. That’s where he was, he’d said. But whether that was where the guy lived or where their office was, Elie didn’t know. That’s what he’d thought about all afternoon, after having failed to find them—Gaspard. 

He had nowhere to be (he never had anywhere to be), so he went to Arts et Métiers and got on the 3. It was a new line for him and led to a new arrondissement. He didn’t expect to run into the guy or anything. What were the odds of that? No, he told himself. This was just an excuse to explore somewhere new. He needed that. He’d been in a solitary holding pattern ever since he’d gotten here. But only today, only after that guy had come to the printer’s and shaken something or unlocked something in him, had he started to notice. It was like the fog that permanently hung over the city (the weather here was as bad as in London, though if you dared to say that, someone might slap you) had lifted. Only metaphorically, of course. It was still drizzling.

But after twenty listless minutes of walking down boring rue de Prony, he got back in the Metro again. The seventeenth was residential, with almost no one on the streets. Elie had spent the entire time staring up at the lit windows of various apartment buildings, imagining all the families inside. They were probably watching the news, setting the table, doing homework. Elie had been so busy imagining which apartment Gaspard might be in—though really, he was probably hanging out somewhere cool and smoky, in, like, the tenth—that he’d tripped over the curb and stepped in dog shit. Great.

Elie needed to get it—Gaspard—out of his mind. Gaspard was just some guy he didn’t know and probably never would. Elie didn’t even know what he’d been saying. It was probably nothing (it was everything). 

He went back to his apartment and picked his way through the mess in the living room, past the door behind which his Irish roommate and her boyfriend were having really loud sex, as usual, and into his room, which looked just as bare as it had when he’d moved in six weeks ago. He fished his headphones out of the suitcase he still hadn’t unpacked, and opened the window so he could lean out. He copied the number into his phone and slipped the piece of paper into a pocket of his equally unpacked-duffel. He blasted Nirvana in a hopeless search for answers or … something. Something to help the itch. At the very least to drown out Siobhan’s faked moans.

Elie felt itchy. He felt hungry. He felt restless. He wanted to run. He wanted…

It would have been cool and Parisian and shit if the smoke from his cigarette had been adding to an atmospheric view of foggy rooftops. Instead, he was staring a brick fucking wall. 

He didn’t call. 

But during that cigarette, he decided to do something else instead.

He tossed the butt out the window and started unpacking.

* * *

Seven days later, Elie had signed up for two language exchange partners, a photography class at a community center, and a membership at this underground gym near the Pompidou where half the people in the jazzercise classes were dudes. He’d started looking for a new apartment, this time with a French roommate, or at least a dorm with other people his age. He’d even already gotten a bite from some guys who had just moved to Paris from Lyon and were looking for a third roommate. He’d stopped eating bagels and started getting panini and falafel for lunch like everyone else.

He’d even started branching out at the imprimerie, which he’d suddenly started referring to by its French name in his head, along with an increasing number of other random words. After Gaspard had made him look—or at least that’s what Elie thought had been going on—he’d started appreciating what a cool place it really was. Rough and mechanical, and as weirdly, commercially beautiful as the stuff it produced. He’d asked Christian to let him help out on more projects instead of focusing only on the limited photography-centric commissions that came their way. He’d even gotten permission to help out on the order that Gaspard and his boss had dropped off that day.

However, he still spent much of his time in the darkroom at the back. Coming out for the first time in hours, he winced at the glare streaming through the skylight, and at the scraping sound of the printers around him. Les guys qui managed the equipment shouted parmi eux.

He gently shook the confusion away. Except that he wasn’t sure which language he was trying to shake out.

“Did you call that guy from last week?” Christian asked, in French, as he passed.

“No, not yet,” Elie replied in kind. 

Elie had never had trouble understanding Christian, even as he struggled to comprehend most of everything else around him. He was accustomed to Christian’s crisp and clear cadences, and the not-too-fast rhythm of his speech. It helped that there was a certain set of topics Christian only ever spoke to him about, and that they always spoke in person, where he could make appropriate gestures to support the words. Elie didn’t speak French, but he spoke Christian well enough. The only other person he felt that way about was the news anchor on Canal 2, whose tone was nice and steady, and whose words were always accompanied by helpfully relevant images.

“Madame is an important client,” Christian said. “What if his question was about the work?” 

“I don’t think it was,” Elie said, savoring each word, and feeling proud of himself for forming them, no matter how simple the sentence was.

“You said you didn’t know he was talking about.”

“I didn’t, but… I know it wasn’t that.” Elie didn’t want to explain. Even if he didn’t know what exactly they’d talked about—well, what Gaspard had talked about—it was their business, private. But he knew that someone who talked about ‘sisters’ and Charlie Parker and Kurt Cobain wasn’t talking about work. 

“What if I deliver the prints to Madame?” he suggested slowly, but more and more boldly, knowing what the answer would be; Christian was always more likely to agree to Elie’s ideas when expressed in French. “I can drop it off on my lunch break. And find out what that guy wanted.”

Christian shrugged. “It would be easier to call, but whatever you want to do. Her gallery is on rue de l'université. I will find the number.”

Elie was breathing too hard to properly smoke the cigarette he spent the next few minutes rolling. He ended up crushing it under his sneaker after only two puffs. His cigarettes never seemed to survive his brave ideas.

* * *

The English lady’s business was either too prosperous to have a storefront, or not prosperous enough. Elie hadn’t learned yet how to tell the difference. He found the small, classy sign beside a door that was sandwiched between a café and a small galerie selling drawings by the guy who did the cutesy _New Yorker_ covers.

“Qui c’est?” a woman’s voice asked through the intercom.

“C’est Elie.” Remembering suddenly that she didn’t know who he was, and that she spoke English, he continued, “From the printer, in the Marais. I have your order.”

“Oh! How lovely.” 

Elie heard the heavy click signifying that she’d unlocked the downstairs door. He made his way through the semi-dark passageway and up a staircase. 

He pushed open the dark blue door that had been left ajar. The English madame was sitting at a large, wooden, Rococo desk set up in the middle of the room and covered with paper. Other than the desk and her hyper-modern chair, the space was spare and white, with an eclectic assortment of pictures—a Picasso here, a Daumier there—nestled attractively in the spaces between the mouldings. At first glance, it almost looked as though she’d curated her collection around the limitations of the space, instead of the parameters of her taste. Strangely, though, looking quickly down the wall, the choices made an interesting kind of sense—went together in a way that somehow worked.

She looked up at Elie with a friendly, slightly boozy smile. Either she’d just had a glass of wine, or that was just what she always looked like. Like her collection, it worked for her. She reminded Elie of his Aunt Susie, the kooky one, the kind one who’d always known how to talk to him, even when he was a teen, and painfully awkward. 

“I’ve never had an order personally delivered before,” she said as greeting, taking in the large folder under Elie’s arm. “Is this a new service Christian is offering?”

“No, he doesn’t. But I… It was on my way,” Elie lied, stammered, worse than if he’d been speaking French. 

She lifted her hands from the keyboard she’d been typing on and peered at him over the top of her cat-eyed reading glasses. “Are you American?” 

“Yeah.”

“Since when does Christian hire Americans?” She chuckled to herself. “I suppose around the same time he started arranging in-person deliveries.”

“I’m not really an employee,” Elie replied. 

“I don’t understand,” she said, sounding interested now. 

There was something about her that put him at ease in a way that nothing—save perhaps Gaspard—had so far in Paris. Was it the resemblance to Aunt Susie? Was it this place? Was it really just Gaspard, and she felt right as an extension? He couldn’t tell, but talking to her was relaxing, so he kept going, even though there was no reason to, and he had never been much of one for talking to strangers. “He’s married to one of my mom’s friends from high school. They set up for me to do a stage at his shop. He lets me use the darkroom after hours and in the morning. I help with odd jobs, and where his English isn’t good enough.”

For a mad moment he considered continuing, going into TMI territory about the dark patch he’d hit after graduation, about what had happened with Sebastian, and how he’d basically been sent here as a sort of rest cure that so far—or at least until a week ago—hadn’t been working at all. But just in time he decided no; she didn’t want to hear all that, no matter how nice she seemed.

“You’re a photographer?” she asked.

Elie nodded. “I’m, uh, trying. Though you know…” Well, he was going to go a little TMI, after all, it seemed. She’s the one who asked, he told himself. “I’ve started thinking the etchings we work on sometimes are cool. More to do with your hands, you know?”

“You sound like my assistant. He likes to get his hands dirty, too.”

Elie filed this information away. She might have more than one assistant, for all he knew, but something told him she didn’t.

“Well, here’s the package,” he said. “And the invoice.”

He stood awkwardly in the center of the room while she simultaneously fished around for her bank information and cooed over the work.

She’d just given him a good segue way, and he could have asked her more questions. Hell, he hadn’t thought about it until just now, but she was nice enough that he might be able to fess up about last week and ask for advice. He was in the middle of thinking up how to do it when a door to an adjoining room opened and Gaspard, looking like even more of a cool mess than before, stepped out. 

Elie’s heart clenched up, like an idiot’s, like the last time. He couldn’t tell if he wanted to mess him up further, or neaten him. Elie couldn’t tell, because he couldn’t properly see him. That had been part of the frustrating problem the last time, and the lingering sense of unease—the cause of the indescribable, dissatisfied itch. He was looking at someone he couldn’t quite see, even though Gaspard was standing right in front of him. It didn’t make any sense.

“Je voulais votre pensées sur le nouveau,” Gaspard began, speaking to his boss, but he stopped abruptly when he saw Elie. 

Elie couldn’t see his eyes—never had, really—for all the hair flopped in front of them. But he could still tell Gaspard’s eyebrows were doing that expressive tilde thing a lot of French guys’ eyebrows did when they were surprised or confused or wanting to look ironical. 

“Hi,” Elie said, stupidly.

“Hi?” Gaspard replied. 

“He’s just dropping off our order from the printer’s,” the madame said, pushing her glasses back up and going back to her typing. “A special in-person delivery, just for us, he said.”

“Oh?” Gaspard asked, putting a whole lot of question into one syllable.

“Yeah,” Elie said, projecting just as many answers.

“Can I…” Gaspard began, still staring at Elie. Then he stopped, and switched to French for some reason. “Marianne, is it all right if I go out?”

“But you only just got in an hour ago,” she replied. God, her French was even worse than Elie’s, which only made him like her more.

“Are you free now?” Gaspard had been looking at Elie the whole time, but now he was actually speaking to him.

“Oui.”

“Oh, I see how it is,” the madame said, chuckling again. “Go on with your American. But be back before M. Havre gets here at three.”

“American?” Gaspard repeated.

Elie nodded, and then kept on nodding, shifting the direction of the nods towards the door. 

“You’ll make sure he’s back in time, won’t you, dear?” Marianne asked Elie. “It’s a very important client and Gaspard tends to lose track of time.”

“I have to be back in the Marais by 2:30, so yeah,” Elie promised, “Don’t worry. Thanks, ma’am.”

“I won’t be late,” Gaspard promised. 

“That’s what you always say,” she replied, but she sounded more amused than annoyed.

Gaspard followed Elie out the door, openly watching his face as they descended the stairs. It would have been weird, and a little creepy, if Elie hadn’t been watching right back. Normally he wouldn’t have, but something about Gaspard—everything about Gaspard—indicated permission.

“Je suis tellement heureux de te voir,” Gaspard said once they were on the sidewalk and had some privacy, in this public space. His whole posture switched as he transitioned into some kind of over-thinking riff that made Elie smile inside to watch, even as his stomach clenched to feel himself being dragged into a redux of last week. “J’avais peur l’autre jour que—”

“Not again,” Elie blurted out.

“Eh?” Gaspard halted midway through an overblown hand gesture, as awkwardly as the guys at the imprimerie did when someone interrupted a pull on the press. 

“English? You talked to your boss in English the other day, so I figured… That’s why I came instead of calling. I wanted to know what you were saying this time.”

Gaspard looked at him and then burst out laughing. “You didn’t understand what I was saying?”

“Nirvana? That’s about all I got.”

Gaspard laughed again, ran his fingers through his hair, and then peered even more thoughtfully at Elie. “But you came today, all the same?”

“Christian wanted to make sure it wasn’t about the work… That I wasn’t blowing off—uh, ignoring—a customer.”

“But that is not why you came,” Gaspard’s tone sat right in the Venn intersection of asking and telling and hoping. 

“No, it’s not.” Elie wasn’t much for grand declarations. He hoped this was enough to get the message across. 

Thankfully, this was all the assurance Gaspard needed to fall back into his usual dreamy confidence. “Good,” he said. “That’s very good to hear.”

It wasn’t getting awkward, per se, standing here on the sidewalk, talking to a stranger who didn’t quite feel like a stranger. But it wasn’t ideal. “So, uh, is there somewhere you want to go?” Elie asked. “We’ve got a half hour for whatever you wanted to ask me.” 

“What I wanted to ask you? That cannot be discussed in a half hour. But… Un café?” Gaspard suggested. “There is a good place juste là-bas.”

They were there almost before they’d started to walk. Gaspard led them to the window seat of the reassuringly non-descript café on the corner. 

“You really speak no French at all?” Gaspard asked once they’d sat down.

“It's not quite that bad. I try. I studied in high school, but a lot of it faded away. I signed up for classes, though, this week, after I met you.”

“You did? Hm,” Gaspard said, pleased, and seeming to get it. “Can I hear you try?”

“What am I supposed to say? I’m not gonna talk about my aunt’s pen and what day of the week it is or whatever shit.”

“No, I don’t want to hear your exercises.” Gaspard leaned forward, and it would have been intense if Elie could just fucking _see_ him, but he couldn't, which didn’t make sense, because he was about eight inches away. “Tell me anything else. Something that matters. Something no one ever asks you about.”

“Okay.” Gaspard made Elie feel drunk. The kind of drunk that makes people forget they don’t know a language, and just start speaking it. Words flowed out, without Elie’s usual carefulness about verbs in the right places or adjectives in invisible agreement. The ends of all the words sounded like ‘eh’, but Elie had always been visual, and liked looking at the spellings in his head. 

A few minutes later, he somehow found himself in the middle of a long and rambling story about this one summer in middle school. Gaspard listened intently, his eyes burning into Elie’s lips and cheeks. A couple of times, his eyebrows pulled together into a V. And when Elie must have said something stronger than normal, they joined together to form a single line behind that floppy mane, tilting up. The tilde again. Elie wished he could see the whole thing, the entire curved line.

“I’m sorry. My French isn’t very good,” he said when he’d run out of steam. (Or rather, when Gaspard’s face had distracted—attracted—what he’d been trying to say right out of his head.) It’s not like it had been a great story to begin with.

Gaspard’s chin twisted into a few interesting angles before he confessed, “No, it is not good. It is odd, but I find I cannot lie to you. Your French is about as good as my English, which is not very good. But I like to listen to you.”

“But you speak English with madame,” Elie said, ignoring the last statement there, because he really didn’t know to reply to those kinds of comments, which, it was clear now, was what the other day’s encounter must have been full of. But by now, he felt fairly certain that his presence here was all the response Gaspard was after, so he decided not to worry about it. 

“My English is not very good, but I speak excellent Marianne.” Gaspard frowned. “I know that makes little sense.”

“No, it does. Trust me.”

With puppy-like earnestness—the kind of earnestness that no one back in Maine could have gotten away with, Gaspard said, “One day I would like to speak good… Christian called you Elie, yes? I would like to speak Elie, the way I speak Marianne.”

Elie didn’t feel quite daring enough—or was it French enough?—to respond in kind. But he sustained eye contact, and replied, “Yeah.”

From the way Gaspard grinned, it was more than enough.

Gaspard ordered a coffee, and Elie nodded quietly to signify he’d have the same. While Gaspard dealt with the waiter, Elie was mulling over something. The lack of lies. “You really like Charlie Parker?” he asked incredulously when they were alone again.

“Sure. Why do you ask?”

“I thought you were saying that to sound cool.”

“I would never.” Gaspard dramatically covered his heart with his hand. And then… “Attends. Do _you_ not?”

Elie shrugged. “I mean, I don’t not like him.” Then, thinking of a way to finally, maybe, match Gaspard’s enthusiasm, he said, “Maybe you could recommend me some good albums?”

“Oui. Yes. I will write you a list.” 

Gaspard started going through his pockets like a mad thing, and must have realized he didn’t have anything to write with. It didn’t matter, though, because he got distracted and randomly worked up again. He grabbed one of Elie’s arms in his sudden excitement. Elie felt a full body shiver, like a dizzy spell or a cold one, he wasn’t sure. And it was weird, because it wasn’t cold and he’d had plenty for breakfast. All he could focus on was the feeling of Gaspard’s hand around his elbow and the moppy hair in front of him. When he came back to Earth, Gaspard was in the middle of talking, and Elie had missed some of it. Again.

When Gaspard got going, he really put his back into it, as though talking were some sort of physically exerting creative exercise. “It is a pleasure… vraiment une plaisir que je ne… that I cannot express, either way… That you came with the prints today.”

“Yeah.” Elie considered telling about how he’d chased Gaspard that day, about how he’d run all the way to the Louvre and beyond. About how his heart had pounded for the first time in so many months, less numb. How he’d joined the gym to try to recapture that feeling, and how it was working, sort of, in a normal, everyday exercise kind of way, which was good, really, it was great, but it wasn’t this—this weird thing where he didn’t feel quite at ease but he definitely didn’t feel like Gaspard was a stranger, and he hadn’t even been running. 

He considered saying all that, but his French wasn’t good enough, and he wasn’t sure Gaspard’s English was either—good enough for the words, sure, but not for what he really _meant_. And anyway, he wasn’t sure he needed to say it. Gaspard seemed to get it—whatever it was.

“Hey, before I forget, let me give you my number,” Elie said instead. “I can call you, and then you’ll have it.”

“Okay.”

Elie opened his satchel, which he’d placed on an empty chair beside him. The bag of rugelah that he’d bought on his way to the Metro was sitting on top, only slightly squashed. He took it out along with his phone and offered one to Gaspard, who started between it and Elie before slowly taking it.

“Tu es juif? I mean, are you Jewish?” He sounded excited, thrilled almost.

“What?” But then Elie looked at the Finkelsztajn’s bag, with its distinctive yellow label, and made the connection. “No. Not Jewish, just lactose intolerant. You know, allergies à lait?” This was in his wheelhouse, one of the first and most important phrases he’d ever learned. But he faltered at the rest. What was the word for kosher? He tried to go around it. “The Jewish tradition… No meat and milk together, you know? The Jewish bakeries… they make the desserts without milk.”

Elie felt kind of lame, but Gaspard’s facial contortions eventually settled into something just as thrilled as before. He looked like he would have happily run with the Jewish thing, but this was cool, too. 

And that’s when Elie got it. There hadn’t been a right answer. Gaspard just wanted to know—to know any little bit of information about him. Elie was a silent puzzle to him, and every piece was a treasure. No one had ever reacted to him like this before, except maybe his mom or something.

“That must be difficult for you, here, in France. With your allergy. But it is clever, very clever of you to have thought of that. The Jewish bakeries, yes.”

“Thanks.”

Elie called the number he’d programmed into his phone. While Gaspard was picking up and saving the contact, Elie noticed a purple spot in the crook of his elbow, right at the point that had almost burned during his little dizzy spell a minute ago. There was a thumbprint there. Gaspard’s thumb printed onto Elie’s skin in purple paint. 

Gaspard noticed Elie staring. 

“Je suis desolé,” he apologized. “I was working in the studio. We left before I could clean—”

“Stop,” Elie said, more assertively than he’d said anything else so far. He held Gaspard’s hands in his and looked for the places where most of the paint had gathered; there was a nice little glob just by his wrist. Elie swiped his thumb hard through it, and then raised it to the crook of Gaspard’s elbow.

“Je peux?” he asked.

Gaspard nodded, and Elie pressed, hard, into the matching spot. 

Gaspard marveled, and seemed to be having a moment (but then again, when wasn’t he?) but Elie couldn’t take it anymore. He reached out with his clean hand and brushed the hair out of Gaspard’s face to see—to finally fucking see—behind. He blinked a few times. These weren’t the world’s most beautiful eyes, nor the biggest, but they were…

“Do you believe in soulmates?” he blurted out, even though he’d never thought about it, and wasn’t even sure if _he_ did.

Gaspard frowned. “Qu’est-ce que c’est? What does that mean?”

 

_FIN ___


End file.
